Author: Bil

I read an interesting blog about the history of the Windows UI. What particularily intrigued me was the evolution of the UI and how it went from flat to 3D with the cycle now returning to the flat look with Office 2003 and eventually Longhorn and the Avalon interface. Here’s some screen caps from that…

Hi guys, Just a quick update on what’s happening. Yes, things are still moving on this side of the fence. I just haven’t spent a lot of time lately with The Sims as lots of Work 1.0 stuff is being released and that’s consuming my brain matter right now. As for the plan, the release…

Dear boss, With the release of Doom3 today, I am taking two weeks of vacation effective immediately. I will not be reachable by direct email, cell phone or smoke signals. Should you feel the need to contact me, please leave a message and I will respond when I stop playing the game because I started…

I’ve been using FireFox for a while now. Recently there’s been a lot of crap about IE and another exploit of the day (FireFox isn’t without it’s problems too). With every new version it just gets better, as well the constant availability and improvement of all sorts of extensions to it, as well as a…

Hi guys, There seems to be a pretty big value in advancing Simventory so in between bug fixing on SimExplorer I’ve taken a stab at getting Simventory off the ground. Below is the initial screenshot (click on it for a larger version that will open in a new window). Once the files are scanned, you…

Hi guys, I was poking around on a few Sims sites and found (courtesy of the Wayback machine) this little thingy: http://web.archive.org/web/20030418000824/www.wwasims.com/ItemsTable/Electronics/ It was a website (probably manually done) that displays an inventory of all the objects in the game, separated by the Expansion Pack they were introduced with (you’ll have to excuse the broken…

I’m always pleased when I see developers commenting code. It means there’s something there that should be commented so the next guy will know WTF whoever wrote it was thinking. However much like any FOX special, there are times when “Comments Gone Wild”. I present some production code that contains some more, err, useful comments…

Thought I would mention a couple of other Sims sites that have been kicking around for quite sometime and worthy of mention here. These guys have been on the Sims scene almost (if not longer) than I have. As I dwindled to a dull roar in the past couple of years with the game, these…

I thought I would toss out a bit of a challenge for you gifted graphical designers out there. Here’s the current MP3 player that’s built into SimExplorer: Pretty crap-tastic huh? So if you’re up for the challenge, come up with a better design (hell, anything at this point would be better) and submit it. Obviously…